done here on earth?" The origin of moral evil has engaged the minds of the most subtle. "Why," demanded the natives on the banks of the Charles, "why did not God give all men good hearts?" "Since God is all-powerful, why did not God kill the devil, that made men so bad?" Of themselves they fell into the mazes of fixed decrees and free will. "Doth God know who shall repent and believe, and who not?" The statesman might have hesitated in his answers to some problems. The ballot-box was to them a mystery. "When you choose magistrates, how do you know who are good men, whom you dare trust?" And again: "If a man be wise, and his sachem weak, must he yet obey him?" Cases of casuistry occurred; I will cite but two, one of which, at least, cannot easily be decided. Eliot preached against polygamy. "Suppose a man, before he knew God," inquired a convert, "hath had two wives: the first childless, the second bearing him many sweet children, whom he exceedingly loves; which of these two wives is he to put away?" And the question which Kotzebue proposed in a fiction, that has found its way across the globe, was in real life put to the pure-minded Eliot, among the wigwams of Nonantum. 66 Suppose a squaw desert and flee from her husband, and live with another distant Indian, till, hearing the word, she repents, and desires to come again to her husband, who remains still unmarried: shall the husband, upon her repentance, receive her again ?" The poet of civilization tells us that happiness is the end of our being. "How shall I find happiness?" demanded the savage. And Eliot was never tired by this importunity or by the hereditary idleness of the race; and his simplicity of life and manners won for him all hearts, whether in the villages of the emigrants or "the smoaky cells" of the natives.

In the islands round Massachusetts, and within the limits of the Plymouth patent, "that young New England scholar," the gentle Mayhew, forgetting the pride of learning, endeavored to convert the natives. At a later day, he took passage for England to awaken interest in his mission; and the ship in which he sailed was never more heard of. But, such had been the force of his example, that his father,

though bowed down by the weight of seventy years, as sumed the office of the son whom he had lost, and, till beyond the age of fourscore years and twelve, continued to instruct the natives of the isles, and with the happiest results. The Indians within his influence, though twenty times more numerous than the whites in their immediate neighborhood, preserved an immutable friendship with Massachusetts.

Thus churches of "praying Indians" were gathered; at Cambridge, an Indian became a bachelor of arts. Yet Christianity hardly spread beyond the Indians on Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket, and the seven feeble villages round Boston. The Narragansetts, hemmed in between Connecticut and Plymouth, restless and jealous, retained their old belief; and Philip of Pokanoket, at the head of seven hundred warriors, professed with pride the faith of his fathers.

But he, and the tribes that owned his influence, were now shut in by the gathering plantations of the English, and were the first to forebode the danger of extermination. True, the inhabitants of New England had never, except in the territory of the Pequods, taken possession of a foot of land without first obtaining a title from the Indians. But the unlettered savage, who repented the alienation of vast tracts by affixing a shapeless mark to a bond, might deem the English tenure defeasible. Again, by repeated treaties, the red man had acknowledged the jurisdiction of the English, who claimed a guardianship over him, and really endeavored in their courts, with scrupulous justice, and even with favor, to protect him from fraud, and to avenge his wrongs. But the wild inhabitants of the woods or the seashore could not understand the duty of allegiance to an unknown sovereign, or acknowledge the binding force of a political compact; crowded by hated neighbors, losing fields and hunting-grounds, and frequently summoned to Boston or Plymouth, to reply to an accusation or to explain their purposes, they sighed for the forest freedom, which was to them more dear than constitutional liberties to the civilized, and which had been handed down to them from immemorial ages.

The clans within the limits of the denser settlements of the English, especially the Indian villages round Boston, were broken-spirited from the overwhelming force of the English. In their rude blending of new instructions with their ancient superstitions, in their feeble imitations of the manners of civilization, in their appeals to the charities of Europeans, they had quenched the fierce spirit of savage independence. They loved the crumbs from the white man's table.

But the Pokanokets had always rejected the Christian faith and Christian manners; and Massassoit had desired to insert in a treaty, what the Puritans never permitted, that the English should never attempt to convert the warriors of his tribe from the religion of their race. The aged Massassoit- he who had welcomed the pilgrims to the soil of New England, and had opened his cabin to shelter the founder of Rhode Island now slept with his fathers; and Philip, his son, had succeeded him as chief over allied tribes. Repeated sales of land had narrowed their domains; and the English had artfully crowded them into the tongues of land, as "most suitable and convenient for them." and as more easily watched. The two chief seats of the Pokanokets were the peninsulas which we now call Bristol and Tiverton. As the English villages drew nearer and nearer to them, their hunting-grounds were put under culture, their natural parks were turned into pastures, their best fields for planting corn were gradually alienated, their fisheries were impaired by more skilful methods, till they found themselves deprived of their broad acres, and by their own legal contracts driven, as it were, into the sea.

Collisions and mutual distrust were the necessary consequence. I can find no evidence of a deliberate conspiracy on the part of all the tribes. The commencement of war was accidental; many of the Indians were in a maze, not knowing what to do, and ready to stand for the English; sure proof of no ripened conspiracy. But to many tribes there were common griefs; they had the same recollections and the same fears; and, when they met, could not but

complain of their common forfeiture of the domains of their fathers. They spurned the English claim of jurisdiction, and were indignant that Indian chiefs or warriors should be arraigned before a jury. And when the expressions of common passion were repeated by an Indian talebearer, fear magnified the plans of the tribes into an organized scheme of resistance.

The haughty chieftain, who had once before been compelled to surrender his "English arms," and pay 1674. an onerous tribute, was summoned to submit to an examination, and could not escape suspicion. The wrath of his tribe was roused, and the informer was

1675. June.

murdered. The murderers in their turn were identified, seized, tried by a jury, of which one half were Indians, and, on conviction, were hanged. The young men of the tribe panted for revenge; without June 24. delay, eight or nine of the English were slain in or about Swansey; and the alarm of war spread through

the colonies.

Thus was Philip hurried into "his rebellion;" and he is reported to have wept as he heard that a white man's blood had been shed. He had kept his men about him in arms, and had welcomed every stranger; and yet, against his judgment and his will, he was involved in war. For what prospect had he of success? The English were united; the Indians had no alliance: the English made a common cause; half the Indians were allies of the English, or were quiet spectators of the fight: the English had guns enough; but few of the Indians were well armed, and they could get no new supplies the English had towns for their shelter and safe retreat; the miserable wigwams of the natives were defenceless: the English had sure supplies of food; the Indians might easily lose their precarious stores. Frenzy prompted their rising. They rose without hope, and they fought without mercy. For them as a nation, there was

no to-morrow.

The minds of the English were appalled by the horrors of the impending conflict, and superstition indulged in its wild inventions. At the time of the eclipse of the moon,

you might have seen the figure of an Indian scalp imprinted on the centre of its disk. The perfect form of an Indian bow appeared in the sky. The sighing of the wind was like the whistling of bullets. Some heard invisible troops of horses gallop through the air, while others found the prophecy of calamities in the howling of the wolves.

1675. June 29.

At the very beginning of danger, the colonists exerted their wonted energy. Volunteers from Massachusetts joined the troops from Plymouth; and, within a week from the commencement of hostilities, the insulated Pokanokets were driven from Mount Hope, and in less than a month Philip was a fugitive among the Nipmucks, the interior tribes of Massachusetts. The little army of the colonists then entered the territory of the Narragansetts, and from the reluctant tribe extorted a treaty of neutrality, with a promise to deliver up every hostile Indian. Victory seemed promptly assured. But it was only the commencement of horrors. Canonchet, the chief sachem of the Narragansetts, was the son of Miantonomoh; and could he forget his father's wrongs? Desolation extended along the whole frontier. Banished from. his patrimony, where the pilgrims found a friend, and from his cabin, which had sheltered the exiles, Philip, with his warriors, spread through the country, awakening their brethren to a warfare of extermination.

The war, on the part of the Indians, was one of ambuscades and surprises. They never once met the English in open field; but always, even if eightfold in numbers, fled timorously before infantry. They were secret as beasts of prey, skilful marksmen, and in part provided with firearms, fleet of foot, conversant with all the paths of the forest, patient of fatigue, and mad with a passion for rapine, vengeance, and destruction, retreating into swamps for their fastnesses, or hiding in the greenwood thickets, where the leaves muffled the eyes of the pursuer. By the rapidity of their descent, they seemed omnipresent among the scattered villages, which they ravaged like a passing storm; and for a full year they kept all New England in a state of